Synthesising intonational varieties of Swedish

Abstract

Within the research project SIMULEKT (Simulating Intonational Varieties of Swedish), our recent work includes two approaches to simulating intonation in regional varieties of Swedish. The first involves a method for modeling intonation using the SWING (SWedish INtonation Generator) tool, where annotated speech samples are resynthesised with rule-based intonation and audio-visually analysed with regards to the major intonational varieties of Swedish. The second approach concerns a method for simulating dialects with HMM synthesis, where speech is generated from emphasis-tagged text. We consider both approaches important in our aim to test and further develop the Swedish prosody model, as well as to convincingly simulate Swedish regional varieties using speech synthesis.